LETTERS; Letters | Paging Dr. Zorba

Published: July 20, 2008

To the Editor:

In his review of Julie Salamon's ''Hospital'' (July 6), D. T. Max fails to explain the subtitle ''Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity. ...'' These were the opening lines of every episode of ''Ben Casey,'' the TV medical drama that ran from 1961 to 1966. An off-camera Dr. Zorba (Sam Jaffe) intoned these five words while a hand wrote the symbols for them on a blackboard. I consider it to be the most effective repeated opening ever used on a TV series, matched only by the best closing lines from another show: ''There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them.''